An Anthropologist’s Guide to Engineering Cultures

Thursday, 4:00 PM EST

What happens when a self-taught programmer with a background in anthropology ends up leading engineering teams?

Robert Harris traces his path from BASIC on a Commodore 64, through a decade in archaeology and the social sciences, to running software teams - and the lessons that came with becoming a manager by accident and a leader on purpose. The hardest problems he ran into weren't technical. They were human. So he went back to his training as an anthropologist to solve them.

This 90-minute session borrows the engineer's own mental model to do it. Culture decomposes into beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts - the abstract classes - and you only observe them through their implementations: the language a team speaks, the rituals and ceremonies it repeats, the experiences that bond it, and the artifacts and art it leaves behind. Robert walks through real examples from teams he has led, including a pull request dumpster-fire beacon, rubber duck onboarding kits, and the rake every new hire steps on once.

It also makes the case that culture was never built by the building. Open source tribes and the gaming guilds of twenty years ago mastered distributed collaboration long before anyone called it remote work, and their playbook still holds for co-located, hybrid, and fully remote teams alike.

Two warnings close the loop: why copying another company's culture produces a cargo cult, and why a culture behaves like a spoked wheel, where you tune the whole system one adjustment at a time.

Attendees will leave with:

• A working taxonomy for reading and shaping the culture they already have
• Concrete rituals, language, and artifacts to adapt to their own teams, wherever those teams sit
• A systems view of culture that explains why the obvious fix usually isn't

Whether you're a reluctant manager, a seasoned leader, or someone who has stepped on a rake in production, you'll leave with the tools to turn dysfunction into culture, and culture into a team that holds together when you're not in the room.